Sex and Stravinsky (18 page)

And – pur-leez – that’s not even to start on this arty sugar-bowl thingy she’s like always kept on the kitchen table. Like it’s not even meant to be a sugar bowl, it’s just like a big silver cup with dents in it that says ‘Presented to James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas on the occasion of his confirmation, 23 September 1875’, because some ancestor who’s got the same name as her mom’s unmentionable brother, Uncle James, who’s most likely dead for all she knows, and she keeps ‘sugar lumps’ in it. Note, ‘lumps’, because she thinks ‘lumps’ are more posh and Englishified than proper sugar, but most likely she does it to try and stop you adding sugar to your breakfast cereal, or your yogurt. Well, that’s just tough, isn’t it, because all you have to do is go and get the sugar packet down from the cupboard. Moron.

And then there’s even this completely embarrassing thing, like this oar thingy, from some rowing boat that’s fixed to the wall, way up on the top-floor landing – OK, so no one’s actually going to see it up there, except her, when she’s off to her witchy little turret that she calls her ‘stud-ee’, but it’s there because Grandpa Ghoul has made her promise to keep it because of some stupid great-uncle who was a rowing Blue at Oxford and one day it’s supposed to go to the unmentionable and probably dead brother, along with the dented sugar bowl etc. Or maybe even the whole house is meant for him as well?

Plus there’s this twirly bookcase full of pocky-looking Dickens that no one’s ever going to read, especially not her mom, because (a) it’s like printed on that old-fashioned scratchy kind of Bronco Bill lav paper that the Ghoul and Old Mother Dribble still have in their bathroom, and (b) she’s always too busy writing those dumbo ballet books of hers. Lola. And then if you ever tell her you think the Lola books are crap, she’ll go, ‘Oh but it keeps me out of mischief, Cat.’ Like what mischief, for crying out loud? And she’ll like pretend she isn’t offended. She just gets this doll-eyed Audrey Hepburn look again, like from her ‘favourite’ film,
Roman Holiday
, and she says, ‘I mean no harm by it, Cattie-pie. Don’t let it bother you.’ Cat reckons her mom thinks that anything to do with Italy is ‘cultured’.

Cat seriously wants to die these days, whenever her mother calls her Cattie-pie and sweetheart, etc, and her voice can really grate the way it sounds so pathetic and snobby and ‘actualleh-actualleh’. But the worst thing – I mean
the
worst – is that, in the very first one of the Lola books she wrote, like when Cat was about eight, she’s put in this really freaky dedication and there it is, still in the school library ten years later – well, OK, eight years, but, anyway, it’s there and it says ‘For dearest Cattie, who danced with me on the Campo Sant’Angelo’. I mean, Jay Christ, how C-R-I-N-G-E is that?

Plus she was always calling her Cattie-pie in front of Michelle, and now, of course, Michelle and them have all pounced on the Lola book and they’re being really mean about it, and telling everybody – just because she didn’t think fast enough to swipe it off the shelf when they first started being so horrible to her. Anyway, nobody at school has ever called her Cattie, or even Cat – not since last year, when she got all her friends and even all the teachers to start calling her Kate. Except that now, of course, Michelle and the others are forever saying ‘Cattie-pie’ behind her back and sniggering. Someone’s even written ‘Cattie-pie ate the pies’ in the girls’ lav. Ha ha ha. Anyway, she’s thinner than Michelle. That’s since this week. Michelle’s bum is bigger and she’s got these really short stubby little legs.

The thing is it was all because Alan liked her and she liked him and she would have said yes to him, except that Michelle went on and on and on about what a slimeball he was. On and on until she had to agree, because Michelle was her best friend, and so she had to tell Alan no, she didn’t like him, not as a boyfriend anyway. And then guess who moved in and took him over, just like that? Bloody Michelle. Of course. But not only that, because now Alan’s been acting like she was kind of so repulsive, like you could get leprosy or something if you went near her, and between him and Michelle and Eleanor and the others, the whole crowd has just pushed her out.

They’ve got this special way of going really quiet the moment she comes near, or else they make this kind of growly noise in their throats, as if they were having to warn each other about her coming their way, like they were going to get poisoned if she breathed on them. Then they all start looking at their fingernails like mad, because none of them will look her in the eye. It’s been going on now ever since last term began, like about eleven weeks, because Alan and Michelle must have got it together during the holidays before the ones they’ve just had, and she knows they call her Miss Piggy behind her back, when it isn’t Cattie-pie.

And another thing is they make out like she’s a big lump by leaving stuff in her desk that they’ve cut out of magazines about cellulite, etc. It’s just like one day she was Kate Marais, with a whole crowd of friends; Kate Marais, who was always best at history and maths and drawing and netball – best at everything, to be honest – Kate Marais, who always got chosen to sing solo in the choir, and then the next day she was the great untouchable. And by now she wouldn’t even mind so much if they’d just literally leave her alone, but they don’t. They pretend they do, but then they keep finding ways of tormenting her.

And now there’s not even anyone to talk to out of school, what with Suz and Jonno gone to uni and her dad away all the time, because he keeps on phoning up and postponing his coming back – and now he’s suddenly gone off to Maputo for another week, or it’ll be Botswana or London – and with her mom who’s got nothing better to do than snoop on you, like the way her eyes follow you round the room when you’re trying to get your breakfast, or like when you get up from the table to use the lav. It’s like you get the feeling she’s got those compound eyes like an insect that can see all over the place. Plus it’s a really big piss-off, the way she’ll try to put these crap cereals like puffed brown rice and Shreddies and stuff at the front of the cupboard, in case you’ll just grab one of them by mistake, instead of taking the Coco Pops.

Anyway, about the Coco Pops, etc, Cat’s already lost twelve kilos, only no one’s going to notice, are they? Not that she wants her mother to notice. She wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, which is why she wears Jonno’s old trackie bottoms all the time, and his old baggy T-shirts when it isn’t school. See, if you’ve got a sort of podgy round face, then everyone just thinks the rest of you is podgy and round to match. But Cat knows she’s got thinner, so fuck her. You just have to pray that she’ll soon disappear into her witchy little room – sorry, her ‘stud-ee’. That’s what she calls it – her ‘stud-ee’ – where she writes all that Lola crap, and another thing that’s disgusting is that her mom has got this like black-and-silver tutu thing that’s hanging from the ceiling over her desk, like strung up on some of her dad’s fishing line. She says to think of it as ‘sculpture’ if it bothers you so much.

Well, maybe she hasn’t noticed but Cat’s stuck her brother’s bowie knife through the crotch, so now it’s got a slash in it, like in those purply Silk Cut cigarette adverts. That’s if she’s ever thinking of it as one of the heirlooms, along with all the clocks and ‘whatnots’ and ‘davenports’ and crap. Anyway, how can a tutu be sculpture? Because sculpture’s got to be made out of stone or bronze or wood or something, hasn’t it? Otherwise it’s just needlework. I mean, a tutu is like just a kitschy sort of sticky-out party dress that shows your fanny. Plus it’s repulsive to think that someone else’s been all sweaty in it. And, by the way, her mom’s feet are really disgusting as well. It’s from all the dancing. It makes your feet go all kind of pervy-looking and weird.

Her dad would really love to have another massive blitz on the house, she can tell. She reckons maybe that’s why he goes away so much, because of the ‘davenport’ factor. It’s started getting on his nerves. Because now he’s sent an email saying he’s got to go to Accra, for God’s sake. I mean, it’s thanks to her dad that their house is like really nice – that’s apart from the ‘whatnot’ and the crap chairs that come to bits in your hand. Like Michelle and Alan and them – they were always like saying how fab her house was, with the swimming pool and the open space and everything. Well, it is. Like it’s got all this glass that makes it look like those photographs of the Pyramide at the Louvre, and the sanded floors and everything. And her dad’s got this agreement with her mom about how this Persian rug in the big sitting room is allowed to spend six months on the floor and six months in store. Only now, because he hasn’t been around, the rug is still on the floor when it should be in the storeroom and she just pretends she hasn’t ‘got round to it’. Like if it weren’t for her dad they’d probably have those horrible carpets everywhere, like in the pictures you see of Buckingham Palace, that looks like a tart’s boudoir with all the gold and stuff, and the hideous oil paintings.

And her mother would probably be sending Cat to that snobby girls’ school, like with the bonnets and the boring green uniforms, like what she went to herself. But at least her dad believes in co-ed. Cat’s decided that, when he gets back, she’s going to make him send her to another school. Like a boarding school, where no one knows her, and she’s going to make sure that, before she goes, she’ll be the thinnest girl in the class as well as the brainiest. Well, she nearly always gets top marks for everything.

Meanwhile, before that happens, she’s just got to do her long art project, and her mom keeps nosing in, like dropping oh so casual remarks about it, like you don’t already know that you’ve got to hand it in, like in three weeks’ time, and you haven’t done anything yet, not even thought of a subject, and you’re pissing yourself.

‘Oh Cat, by the way, that project of yours. What about masks? Just a thought.’

Like thinking has ever been a big thing with her. Stupid cow.

What’s more, Cat knows that her parents would probably be divorced if it weren’t for her because Suz and Jonno told her that once, when she wouldn’t stop pestering them to let her play when she was little. That’s because they were always so ‘together’ and a bit older, so she was the odd one out. So now you can tell her mom’s really sorry she never had an abortion – so much for ‘dearest Cattie-pie’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘the Campo Sant’Angelo’, and all that bullshit.

What’s really even more of a piss-off is that Michelle and them have started ringing her cell phone and then just cutting out whenever she picks up so she’s stopped picking up, only now they ring from a call box so she can’t tell from the numbers who it is, which means she can’t even answer her own phone any more.

Anyway, it’s like a week on from when her dad last emailed about going to Accra and meanwhile something slightly weird has been happening at home because first of all her mother’s been twittering on about this ‘charming young man’ that’s come to live in her dad’s new annexe, and how she really must have him in to dinner, if only she wasn’t so ‘busy’, because she’s got ‘a deadline’, and how she just knows Cat will find him really interesting, etc – as if you’d give a shit about anyone she thinks is charming or interesting.

‘Charming’ probably means he’s like pretended he’s heard about all her Lola books, or something. Plus he’s probably about thirty-five. ‘Giacomo’, she says. That’s the tenant’s name. ‘Giacomo’, because he’s just come from Milan. But, as well as that, her mom’s been banging on about how she’s got to do this ‘presentation’ at ‘a conference’, if you please, and she’s pretending like she wants Cat’s advice – well, that’s until she’s started suddenly staying out all hours, like from about three days ago until yesterday, when she comes home with this weirdo bloke who’s about as much of a midget as she is – i.e., he’s about twenty centimetres shorter than Cat – and they’ve got these takeouts from the Italian deli that they spread out all over the kitchen table for supper, like about a million calories per item when she usually eats like a bird, and she’s saying, ‘Do tuck in, Cattie-pie. Join us, sweetheart, do,’ and pretending that they really want her to stay and eat with them, but she’s buggered if she’s going to sit there and watch her mother being embarrassing with the midget, who, she says, is ‘working’ with her on a mime sequence about that ballet she was banging on about last week.

‘Oh Cat,’ she says. ‘This is my dear old friend Josh Silver from way back. He’s here for the conference, you see. We’re planning a mime to illustrate my talk. So now you and I have both got projects with deadlines.’ Ha. Ha. Then she says, ‘He’s got a daughter called Zoe – a bit younger than you.’

Yeah. Right. I mean, so what? Does she want Cat to alert the media about it, or what?

‘It would be so nice if you could meet one day,’ she says.

Anyway, then she and the midget start munching all this lasagne and stuff and drinking all her dad’s red wine and then they disappear upstairs and start moving furniture around and Cat reckons any day now her mother will be prancing round in the sweaty black tutu with the hole in the crotch. Especially as, three days later, the midget has become a bit of a fixture and they’re forever talking and laughing about shit all and she’s even heard her mom tell him that mean little story she loves, about Cat’s favourite aunt, Lettie, her dad’s sister, who’s been going to a Zulu class to make up for how ‘badly’ she’s always treated black people in the past. Or that’s what Lettie’s told her.

‘Shame,’ her mom is saying, and she’s trying to mimic Lettie, but she’s like seriously crap at doing accents. ‘To think we’ve always expected “them”, with their low intelligence, to learn both our languages, and us, with our high intelligence, we haven’t bothered to learn theirs.’